Wednesday 12 March 2014

Flight MH370 - 5 days on and still a mystery...

Update 15 March 2014

An image of a Malaysia Airlines 777
This is looking more and more like a hijack/terrorist scenario given that communications on the plane may have been deliberately disabled and that the authorities are now looking at the crew/passenger manifest in more detail.

BBC Breakfast interviewed an 'expert' in the last hour who referred to the 'point of maximum confusion' during the plane's journey.

This would be the point at which communications with the plane would be handed over from one country or region's airspace control to another and during which a hostile takeover might possibly have taken place.

This may offer the hope (however faint) that the passengers and crew are still alive and that they - and the aircraft itself - are being held for a ransom at a secret location...

Main article


By now you may have heard about the 'disappearance' of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 five days ago.

Rather than repeat the story here, this BBC article covers developments so far in full.

The BBC have also posted an article about other mysterious airline incidents - some not resolved until many years later.

It remains to be seen what category of incident flight MH370 falls into. It would clearly be premature to even speculate at this stage about what might have happened but, of course, conspiracy theories - including those relating to UFOs - are already viral on the net.

What this most likely tragic story highlights however, is how the world's air travel infrastructure is still vulnerable in the 21st century, nearly a hundred years after the start of the first 'fixed wing' airline. It also shows that, despite all our modern technology which includes radar and satellite tracking systems, finding a large passenger aircraft (or potential wreckage thereof) with 239 people on board, in a search area recently expanded to 92,000 sq km, is an extremely challenging task.

Assuming the plane never made it to dry land, the ocean is a very big and very deep place to be looking through.

My thoughts go out to those relatives of the people on flight MH370 waiting for any news at this time.


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